Quotes by Statisticians - Page 2

English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Self-acceptance means fully accepting yourself no matter what your traits or how you perform or achieve. It does not mean self-esteem, self-confidence, or self-regard. These terms imply that you accept yourself because you perform or behave in a specific way or because people accept you based on your achievements. Self-acceptance means that you non-judgmentally accept yourself for who you are without rating or evaluating yourself, or requiring the approval of others.
Lee A. Wilkinson
Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.
Ronald A. Fisher
The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation and close adult supervision.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don't talk.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
It took us a while to discover that we do effectively think, but that we more readily narrate backward in order to give ourselves the illusion of understanding, and give a cover to our past actions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You ask me why I do not write something.... I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.
Florence Nightingale
The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a short-term cure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I never bought into the whole “second amendment” argument as it relates to the 21st century. Originally, it was put into place for the simple reason that our forefathers were fighting or had just fought off a government that threatened them with weapons. If those in the revolution had no weapons, there would be no United States of America, but rather New England of the New World. So, I understood why they thought it was so important.
Martin Manley
Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Life is about execution rather than purpose.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What I learned on my own I still remember
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.
W. Edwards Deming
We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If we weren’t already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?
Paul Depodesta
Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We shouldn’t abbreviate the truth but rather get a new method of presentation.
Edward Tufte
A prophet is not someone who first had an idea. He is the one to first believe in it and take it to its conclusion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats.
Florence Nightingale
My mother explained the magic with this washing machine the very, very first day. She said, 'Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.' Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children's books.
Hans Rosling
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The real difficulty about volcanism is not to see how it can start, but how it can stop.
Harold Jeffreys
The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The real difficulty about volcanism is not to see how it can start, but how it can stop.
Harold Jeffreys
The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
At the Harvard Symposium for Hard Problems in Social Science , Emily Osterpresented a very simple, elementary problem: almost all people with type-2diabetes who are overweight can be cured by losing a little bit of weight. They aremade aware of it, yet they usually gain weight a�er diagnosis (she mentioned"Atkins" among the options, so it was not just AMA low-fat.). It is so obvious thatwe know what to do yet do not carry the action because thinking can be largelyornamental. The proof of the sterility of (a significant class of) knowledgesterility of (a significant class of) knowledge was rightthere (among the obvious evidence that the population has been gaining weight inspire of technological and educational progress). Yet the others social scientistskept exalting the value of "education" in spite of this simple devastating evidence.Someone even suggested teaching more "critical thinking". This is the great suckerproblem: people who teach truly think that teaching, or, worse, preaching, cures.
Nassim Taleb
Learning is not cumpulsory... neither is survival.
W. Edwards Deming
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You cannot do anything with knowledge unless you know where it stops, and the costs of using it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you seek creative ideas go walking.Angels whisper to a man when he goes fora walk.
Raymond I. Myers
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If I could give you information of my life it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do in His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing. I have worked hard, very hard, that is all; and I have never refused God anything.
Florence Nightingale
Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative “low risk” game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Things always become obvious after the fact
Nassim Nicholas Taleb